Staff, patients and visitors share some favorite Home Hospital moments

Feb. 9, 2013

YOUR STORIES After asking for Home Hospital memories, the Journal & Courier received an amazing amount of stories of all types. We are so grateful for this community’s willingness to share memories and thank you for every call and email. We wish there was enough room to fit them all. But don’t stop reminiscing end now, keep sharing your Home Hospital stories on our Facebook page: http://on.jconline.com/Y1YI2B.— MaryJane Slaby/mslaby@jconline.com

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Anna Krammes was working as a nurse on the orthopedic floor of Home Hospital when two firefighters came up from the emergency room with broken legs.

They were going to a house fire and arguing about the best way to get there when they crashed the firetruck, Krammes said. She said the men were still arguing at the hospital from their separate rooms.

“I decided I had enough,” Krammes said. And she put them in the same room so they could argue and not bother other patients. But when one asked for paper and crayons to color his daughter a picture, the other said he was better at coloring and asked for crayons, too.

Krammes said the two colored so much that they made Easter door decorations for everyone on the floor.

In the late 1960s, Nell Kretzshmar donated blood for the first time at Home Hospital. She was waiting in the front desk area for the money when a man rushed up next to her to tell a worker that the woman he was pushing in a wheelchair was in labor.

“I turned, looked at her, and promptly fainted falling against her,” Kretzshmar said. “I remember I awoke on my way to being taken to the emergency department. The staff person told me I kept asking about my ‘blood money.’ ”

“I have often wondered about the person I fainted on,” she said. “And I did get my ‘blood money.’ ”

When a pregnant Lillian Phillips realized it was time for her daughter to be born, she went to tell her husband, Fred. But he was in the shower.

Once he got out, the couple drove to Home Hospital where a candy striper was waiting with a wheelchair.

“I thought we would never make it,” Phillips said. She said she thought her daughter would be born in the elevator everything was happening so fast. Then all of a sudden, her daughter Cindy was born.

Although it was 42 years ago, Phillips said her daughter has the same attitude she did on the day she was born.

“She’s a let’s-get-it done-now type of person,” Phillips said.

Just days after graduating from Purdue University in June 1951, Kenneth Bales’s son, Roger, was born at Home Hospital. But a few days later, his wife Marjorie died — leaving Bales a single parent far from his home in southern Indiana.

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For the two weeks that Bales spent arranging his wife’s funeral and finishing up his graduate classes, baby Roger stayed at Home Hospital. And the nurses grew so attached to him they were sad to see the baby leave, Bales said.

“I really appreciated the affection from the nurses and staff, ” he said.

Elizabeth Westfall has many memories of Home Hospital, but one in particular that occurred during a visit made a lasting impression.

“An elderly patient became disoriented and left his room. Hospital security was called,” Westfall said. “Two longtime security officers, Mark Jenkinson and David Deaton with more than 30 years experience, responded. These two gentlemen found the patient in another area — he was trying to find where he belonged. They both, with gentle kindness, guided him back to his room, reassuring him that he was safe.”

Westfall said she hopes that if she was ever in a similar situation, those two men would be there.

Marshall Horn, now 98, was born at Home Hospital in 1915. But when he was 16 in 1931, he returned to the hospital with a ruptured appendix. He said he stayed for 16 days while doctors treated him using salt water.

“They cured me, I was very lucky to live,” Horn said.

In the end, he said his bill was $5 a day for a private room and $35 for the operation.